The competitive naming-rights space has a new broker.
Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment and Cooper Holdings have formed Entitle, a joint venture tied to selling naming rights for sports and entertainment venues.
The two principals involved in the new company, Brooklyn Sports CEO Brett Yormark and Lonnie Cooper, CEO of Atlanta-based Cooper Holdings, have worked together on sponsorship deals over the past 15 years, dating to Yormark’s days in NASCAR.
Entitle launches with two clients that have retained it to sell naming rights to major league facilities, but Yormark refused to identify them to protect client confidentiality. The new firm plans to pursue business both domestically and internationally, Cooper said.
Mike Zavodsky, Brooklyn Sports’ executive vice president of global partnerships, will serve as Entitle’s president of sales. He will oversee a staff of three to five people working out of Brooklyn Sports’ headquarters in Brooklyn.
Yormark and Cooper will be involved in Entitle as well, along with Fred Mangione, chief operating officer of the Brooklyn Nets and Barclays Center.
Cooper Holdings’ subsidiaries include sports marketing agency CSE and Vantedge, an analytics firm that Entitle will use in the valuation of potential naming-rights deals. Read Ziegler, president of Vantedge, and Ryan Duffy, CSE’s executive creative director, will have principal roles with Entitle, Cooper said.
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High Point Solutions’ naming rights deal at Rutgers University’s football stadium was brokered by Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
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Brooklyn Sports used Cooper Holdings to provide all the measurements, metrics and analytics for the Barclays Center naming-rights deal. The agreement, signed in 2012, is reported to be $200 million over 20 years.
“We put together all the collateral material for the presentations, working behind the curtain,” Cooper said.
The two parties collaborated again on a presenting sponsorship of Nassau Coliseum, which is now called The New Coliseum Presented by NYCB. In that deal, Nassau Coliseum was renamed as it goes through a $260 million renovation. The arena, to be run by Brooklyn Sports, reopens in April as a smaller, more intimate venue for sports and concerts.
Those two deals are in addition to past naming-rights agreements sold by Brooklyn Sports alone for Izod Center, Rutgers’ High Point Solutions Stadium, and Ford Amphitheater at Coney Island Boardwalk, which was completed in June.
As a result, both Yormark and Cooper felt the time was right to join forces to start the new firm.
“Lonnie has done different measurement-related exercises for us, and it was the same at NASCAR, where we had him on retainer,” Yormark said. “We used him extensively, and we have always discussed how we could work together.”
Those talks intensified over the past six months in the wake of the Nassau Coliseum deal to the point that they formed the new company.
“We saw a great opportunity in front of us,” Cooper said. “The way we’re approaching it based on the success we’ve had with naming rights is pretty special. We felt good about the marketplace to get this thing off the ground.”’
The new agency joins an already crowded landscape, with a number of established firms including Premier Partnerships, Gemini Sports Group, Van Wagner Sports & Entertainment, Legends Global Sales and CAA Sports.
